PixelJunk Monsters is a tower defense game set on tropical islands in which you play as Tikiman who is tasked to defend his home from the onslaught of various monsters. While this sounds very appealing, PixelJunk Monsters is riddled with a myriad of serious problems that will only frustrate and bewilder you.
It pretty much plays as a classic isometric tower defense game, the only notable difference being that you only directly control Tikiman, so you have to use him to do pretty much anything. Tikiman has the ability to cut down trees and build towers in their place. The tower selection is abysmal and the game will force you to use three or four towers most of the time. To unlock a few towers more, you have to collect gems which are randomly dropped by defeated monsters. You can also use these gems to upgrade existing towers.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the controls are surprisingly wonky. Tikiman will almost always sort of slide just off the point you designated him to stop. Unfortunately, a small thing such as this becomes a major problem simply because Tikiman has to be in the exact spot of anything you need to interact with, be it a tower or his home. When you finally do get him into place, you will find out that you usually have to click several times on the tower before the game registers your command. This becomes a huge problem when there are several towers very close to each other. He also has to manually collect every single coin and gem dropped by the destroyed monsters. All of this leads to incredibly monotonous, frustrating and completely needless micromanagement.
The true incompetence of the developer failing to understand the appeal of tower defense games is best evident in the game design. When you fail a map in a superbly designed tower defense game, you always know why and how you failed and you can devise new tactics on your second try. That’s what makes you keep going and repeating a level until it is perfect. In PixelJunk Monsters, you will repeat levels because the game will punish you for not being psychic. Most maps have multiple routes, but you have absolutely no idea which one the monsters will take, you cannot affect or change paths in any way and you don’t know anything about the upcoming monsters and their abilities until they actually show up.
Speaking of monsters, the difficulty spikes are absolutely insane. All bosses are incredibly slow and boring making them complete pushovers which makes each and every final wave disappointingly anticlimactic whereas you will get completely trumped by a random low level monster wave. All of these bewildering design choices result in constant soul-crushing trial and error effectively destroying any semblance of strategy so inherent to the tower defense genre.
The game looks nice enough. It sports simple 2D graphics, but the art style is vibrant and colorful. The tower and monster designs, however, are rather poor. Upgrading the towers will only change their appearance when they reach the final level and even then it only adds a golden outline. Until then, the only way to differentiate them is by looking at the ugly colored flags. The animations are pretty bad and the sound effects are lousy. The only redeeming quality is the lovely and surreal electronic soundtrack.
Considering the stiff competition within the genre, PixelJunk Monsters Ultimate has far too many problems for it to be considered anything but a complete and utter failure with frustratingly poor controls and absolutely awful trial and error design.